History Bureau Agent, October 8, 2022
Video (Chat GPT-3, Voice Generator, Blender, Machinima)
Thai filmmaker and artist Nanut Thanapornrapee centers his practice on the construction of personal and historical narrative. His ongoing series, This History is Auto-Generated, includes films and interactive novels that reimagine Thailand’s recent political history. To create the works, Thanapornrapee uses political events from the past century to train a Chat GPT-3 text generator. He then asks the AI to generate alternative histories, which are visualized as screenplays and animation films. History Bureau Agent is one chapter of this series, in which the protagonist finds a secret Thai Military operation room where reality can be manipulated and altered by a “history simulator machine.” As the artist reflects about this project: “Let us perceive a glimpse of the alternative possibilities of the present world apart from military dictatorship and capitalism.”
Artist Bio
Nanut Thanapornrapee is a visual artist who uses essay images and a participatory approach to explore the meta-narrative and history of people and technology. He graduated with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication (majored in photography and filmmaking), at Thammasat University. Previous work includes: No man's land (2018), which portrays and collaborates with Nu Muhummad, a Rohingya individual who has lived in Thailand for 30 years, and his narrative of diaspora; N01SE.jpg (2019), a series of digital photography that explores the memories of digital cameras through noise and pixels; HAWIWI: I Wish I Wrote a History (2021), which experiments with meta-narrative by writing a history of Ratchaburi via card game and participatory with locals including high schooler and elementary students, created with Baan Norg Collaborative Art and Culture; and This History is Auto-Generated (2022), a reenactment of history by using AI. In 2021, Thanapornrapee received the Prince Claus Seed Award and participated in a mobile lab program at Documenta Fifteen.
Nanut Thanapornrapee on originality and Censorship of AI:
“The issue about originality of work between A.I. and artists still depends on the artist or individual who produces the work because the input or data was chosen by the artist themselves. Copyright and ownership is still in a gray area right now, especially as this required a certain profession to analyze and design this law. The censorship is very common in my country where the military government dictatorship regime but in turn of A.I. When they develop further I think there will be more censors as well, maybe from states or corporations. The aesthetics that A.I. influence is very similar to past technology or tools that were invented in the past. We will learn from it and make our own ways. In the end, it still depends on us to decide what we want to produce. A.I. decentralized the capacity to create art for everyone and it accessible give us the right and power to own the art different from history.”